Glyn Hughes 1931 - 2014

279 Illuminating Toller A thoughtful essay by Glyn Hughes on the early 1990’s Nicosia and the reasoning behind the making of the imagery for Ernst Toller’s play “Man and the Masses” “Too” yellow, almost Vietnamese kitsch or even the wild beasts left out in the sun. For Toller! These were reactions to my first watercolours for an “all-around” backcloth I made for Ernst Toller’s Man and the Masses , directed by Heinz-Uwe Haus and staged at Trier in Germany in 1993. Set in that country, it was first put to paper while the poet and playwright was in the prison-fortress of Nieder- Schönfeld in 1919. Colour? Grey, brown, beige, and lots of black more likely. An extended poem of feelings, a poem of deep anger and protest, a fragment of the social revolution of the twentieth century. The text observes that three of the scenes are dream pictures, while the other four are visionary abstracts of reality. The play, written during social upheaval, is a heightened version of reality. Where is the palette of the heightened version of reality and where are the dreams? They could be in colour. They could be anywhere. I live on the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus, which is itself a heightened version of reality. It is there, every day. I wake up to it. It is yellow. Surreal. Not quite in Europe. Yet. It’s on the far end. An island on the Mediterranean. I’m actually from the other end of Europe, Wales, a country of rain almost every day and dark landscape, choosingtoliveinCyprustodevelop my art: painting. A country where the light is unnervingly clear and spatial relationships of form and colour differ from my own country. Sound too. Church bells coincide with the voice of the hodja at prayer. Scavenger dogs roam, wild flowers push through the gravel, and barbed wire flourishes as well. There seems to be a weird liaison between foliage and camouflage. Between the blooming of a delicate life force and organised containment. White irises once from a garden home –and were everywhere– have now vanished to be replaced by formal fences. Roofs are torn off some houses with Barbary doves posing among the rafters against a clear sky. Other roofs are restored; for a press club. What was a road of blackened-out cars and empty shells of houses is on the verge of becoming millionaire’s row. The change is rapid. Physical contrasts as severe as the social injustice in Toller’s play. Every night I pass a U.N. post and hear my native accents. The Asian students and migrant workers living in the cheap accommodations found in the neighbourhood have a similar Celtic lilt. Arabic is heard in the streets and at the Mass in the Maronite church. There are Greek Orthodox Serbians, young men, around as well. You can walk through a Venetian corridor with rusty metal drums above. See the corrugated iron roofs of coffee houses, blown to pieces, which now appear to flicker around like leaves. Above the inner entrance of the Venetian corridor is an incised Ottoman monogram. There is a restored Lusignan hall, too, and expensive cars. On a Sunday at the Catholic church, which strides the dividing line between the Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks, Sri Lankan and Filipina housemaids take up the pews. They are from troubled countries and insecure. Any one of the young women could be Sonja the heroine of the play. Each one has a problem. In their dreams, too, they could overlap the nightmarish brutality, dynamic contrast, threads of thought, knots of violence, human frailties, understanding, and love, which is Sonja’s world. These mankinds, womankinds are individuals, men and women living in an area of sharp and jagged contrasts: the Buffer Zone in Nicosia. The Green Line dividing Greek Cypriots and